The Infinite Gyre @SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC
Michael A. Robinson & Sizhu Li
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
——W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Believing in the gyre theory, the recurring and repeating process of perpetual chaos in human history, W. B. Yeats predicted the tumultuous 20th century, as well the decentralization in post-modernity. In a world where all the giants collapsed and all the sacred are profaned, the center of power has been deconstructed and redefined. Our generation has been challenged with the overwhelming amount of new idols, yet we worship them in the same old way that we inherited from everything that we intended to overthrow: withdrawing from all exits, creating niches to be trapped in, in the hope of seizing the fragmental sense of security in the roaring, protean hurricane of flourishing unpredictability.
The Infinite Gyre @SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC
Curated by Tansy Xiao
March 3 - March 9, 2020
625 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022
For press and sales inquiries, please contact:
Tansy Xiao, xiaotansy@gmail.com
For tickets and more information, please visit:
http://www.springbreakartshow.com
Sizhu Li, What Is WATT, 2018, Site-Specific Installation (Aluminum Sheets, Wood, Arduino, Sensors, Fans, Light Bulbs), Dimensions Variable
Michael A. Robinson, The Origin of Ideas, 2013, Site-Specific Installation (Found Lamps, Led Lights, Tripods), Dimensions Variable
The Infinite Gyre is a dual exhibition featuring the installations of two international artists Michael A. Robinson and Sizhu Li. Both of their works delineate an idyllic machine-dominated wonderland with no trace of humanity, which could be interpreted as either post-apocalypse or that humankind had evolved into more immaterial forms thus evaporated from the land that we currently inhabit. In Robinson’s The Origin of Ideas, numerous found lamps are assembled to illuminate a center of absence, where no object of worship or attention exists. As for Li’s What Is WATT, a nihilistic view of labor is suggested to the spectator via the mere display of Sisyphean efforts with no clear goal to their functionality. The hustle and bustle of human activities, in the making and destroying of new goods and new gods, as Shakespeare abstracted through the obscure soliloquy of Macbeth’s, is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
In the agenda-setting theory developed by Max McCombs and Donald Shaw last century, the press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it. In today’s world where the center no longer holds, in the illusion of free will and trillions of flourishing options, we’re still browsing the systematically selected information facilitated by algorithms and the longing for a sense of belonging with a manipulated eye. The viewers at the show, as passers-by or settlers of this metropolis, are invited to observe the model of a post-industrial society built upon yet isolated from anthropic impacts, and in their own ways, through the non-participatory interaction with the works, to interrogate the absurd nature of what’s being seen.
Exhibition view at SPRING/BREAK 2020, photo courtesy of Benton C Bainbridge